I'm very excited to announce the opening of THAW, an exhibition featuring the work of Adam Benjamin Fung, Amy Sacksteder, and myself. This will be the first exhibition I've put together/curated from the ground up. Read on for more info!

The world is changing, warming, mutating. Weather patterns shift and grow unpredictable. Glaciers disappear and snow fails to accumulate; permafrost liquefies for the first time in an epoch. The part humans have played in this undeniable change is more and more evident on a daily basis. Yet, not only do human societies and institutions seem incapable of responding adequately to the situation, many are unable to even think the changes that are now shaping the future of life on this planet. The becoming-geological implied by the Anthropocene opens up a view on a human relationship with the Earth that has transmuted into something unrecognizable.

THAW attempts to bring together artists whose work touches on the wildly divergent consequences of the Anthropocene and climate change--those attempting, in their own fragmentary ways, to meet the demand climate change poses to human thought: the loss associated not only with melting ice caps and glaciers, with the destruction of habitats and the altering of coastlines; but the loss of geological and ecological naivete, the loss of narratives of human control of the environment, and the end of the belief that human beings stand apart from the world they live in. French theorist Bruno Latour refers to global warming as ‘climate mutation’, perhaps a more apt term: implying not only an unpredictable future on this planet’s surface, but one potentially more strange than any current model can predict. The works included in this exhibition contribute new dimensions to the visual imaginary of a world irreversibly altered in the Anthropocene: some through quiet and spare contemplation of intimately linked networks, others registering the incoherence, acceleration, and fractured scales of this mutating world.   

In his review of Jeff Vandermeer’s 2017 novel Borne, Steven Shaviro writes

The Anthropocene means that “we” (human beings) have irreversibly altered the entire biosphere; but it also means that, in doing so, we have exposed ourselves, more fully and more nakedly than ever before, to the geological and biological forces that respond to us in ways that we cannot anticipate or control.

Through the work of visual artists Adam Fung, Lucas Korte, and Amy Sacksteder, THAW attempts to further the recognition of those geological and biological forces, to reckon with an Earth that does not exist totally ‘for us’, as well as what it means to seriously contend with such a realization. Paintings, drawings, video and installation act as indexes for prolonged thinking about this melting, mutating ground we walk on.

The show will open Thursday Sept 21st with a reception from 5:30-7:30pm and run until Nov 17th. The Notre Dame Center for Arts and Culture is located at 1045 W. Washington St. South Bend IN, 46601

The following originally appeared in the written portion of my MFA thesis. I have plans to continue publicizing the writing from this project as the process of writing, along with visual investigation, continues to be central to the mode of inquiry here.

An important aspect of scientific thinking is the commitment to a mind-independent reality1. In order to take the claims of science seriously, in the spirit in which they are stated, one must assume that those things in the universe which science attempts to describe are really real, and have their existence independent of human observers and human conceptions. Steven Shaviro makes the case that science then moves forward through a ‘negotiation with nonhumans’ rather than through the imposition of human will2. In order to explore the elusive, subterranean recesses of materiality, it is necessary to form a complicit relationship with matter itself--allying with a nonorganic intermediary to probe the abyss of the nonorganic. We require a xenoscope.

In the erratic architecture of this xenoscope, an issue for the human petitioner emerges: the xenoscope does not perceive the universe in a way that resembles human perception. There may be some baseline similarities such as the detection of electromagnetic waves. This means that visuality may be a commonality, but here operates as a lowest-common denominator. There would be much in the perceptual array of the xenoscope that simply does not overlap with the human visual experience, even allowing that the two agents both perceive in a primarily visual manner (which they likely don’t). Some trivial examples: humans do not perceive in infrared or ultraviolet, nor do they perceive x-rays. Perhaps the xenoscope is capable of these things. Perhaps it is
capable of registering the presence of electromagnetic waves in ways wholly different from the (phenomenological and meaning-making) structures of visuality we are familiar with3.

This raises a problem of translation. Any translation of information from the hypothetical xenoscope to the senses of the human petitioner will be, at best, partial. Not only that, but the information thus amenable to translation would itself be garbled in ways counter-intuitive to our habitual reception of sensory experiences. So, on the one hand we are closed off from the phenomenological world of the xenoscope, missing vast chunks of data that simply cannot be transformed comprehensibly to fit a corresponding human faculty; and on the other hand, we must twist and contort our usual ways of ‘reading’ the world in order to learn an altered, highly specialized way of interpreting new information. An example might be the practice of reading x-ray crystallography, historically used to identify the helical structure of DNA4. The casual observer would be unable to make any sense of the information presented by an x-ray crystallographic readout. Training is required before this practice can yield reliable information. In this case, one xenoscopic agent is the x-ray itself, which ‘detects’ or ‘perceives’ the world in a way radically different from any human perception. The training required to decipher a crystallographic image is yet another manifestation of the negotiation with nonhuman agents required by science.

A second problem is raised in light of the first: we must acknowledge that the xenoscope itself does, in fact, have a phenomenological world of its own. We must acknowledge the reality of an object-object perception mediating our own. The xenoscope will have its own perceptual agenda, it will experience a constellation of aesthetic seductions peculiar to it, it will probe the world on its own terms5. It is analogous to an embedded journalist in a blackout zone, investigating what draws it, capturing and translating its particular experiences, and reporting back what it deems fit to report-- and always utilizing the full length of its leash*. The human petitioner’s job is to gather up the scraps of data that we are lucky enough to have come through the filter of translation. Recognizing the primacy of the object-object relationship in this triad of perceived-perceiving intermediary-end perceiver opens us up to the reality that all of the relationships in this alliance are between objects6. The human being is the third object; the human is merely a variety of nonhuman7.

One last question is relevant here. If the theoretical xenoscope is designed and constructed by humans, how can we take seriously the above claims? A synthetic probe is of our making, a human extension, and therefore it exists for us, does it not? In reality, the synthetic probe indexes our negotiation with nonhumans at a more intense level8. First, in order to build a probe which explicitly does not perceive in a human manner, we must create something fundamentally unhuman. The radically unhuman character of the probe itself reveals the extent to which our own human technics are in fact unhuman at their root9. Not only do they (our technological objects) violate our intentions, thwart our will, take on unpredictable shapes, and contaminate across our rigid cultural boundaries, but they must be nonhuman from the beginning in order to extend us in any useful way. We cannot improve or extend human capacities by simply adding more ‘human’ to ourselves.

To acknowledge the object-object relationship between probe and universe is to acknowledge a fundamental unhumanness in the universe. To attempt to reinforce the boundary between human and nonhuman, to immunologically reify the unique ‘humanness’ of the probe by claiming it as a prosthetic (literally an extension of the human body) is to undo the intended intellectual work in the very same move--it is simply to parse the demarcation between human and nonhuman somewhere within the human body itself--it is to make the human body the next theatre for the promiscuous admixture between human and nonhuman10. There is no end to this problem of boundary placement because the humanist cartography cannot be permanently imposed on the universe: it will not afford boundaries of this kind. To acknowledge the probe as unhuman is to acknowledge the fundamental nature of thought as unhuman11.

The xenoscope is always unhuman and is always operating for itself.

*none of this is intended to unduly anthropomorphize the xenoscope. The example operates, as all useful anthropomorphizing does, to metaphorize a phenomenon that we have no linguistic or conceptual precedents for12. The xenoscope would not exhibit a human-like psychology, nor is it even likely to be alive. For all that, it does encounter the universe in its own way, and that way is primary for our purposes.

Notes

1 Discussions on the status of the claims of science, and arguments for accepting a mind-independent reality can be found in Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), as well as the introduction to Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

2 Steven Shaviro, “Arsenic Dreams,” E-Flux, 2015, http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/arsenic-dreams/

3 An extended argument for thinking through the ‘perceptions’ between nonhuman (particularly nonliving) agents can be found in Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to be a Thing, (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), particularly the chapter titled “Metaphorism.”

4 See Roman Kazantsev and Michelle Towles, “X-Ray Crystallography,” UC Davis Chemwiki, 2016, http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/Core/Analytical_Chemistry/Instrumental_Analysis/Diffraction/X-ray_Crystallography

5 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology.

6 This is one of the core tenets of Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, which is laid out in many of his books and lectures. A specific reference would be Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object, (Zero Books, 2011).

7 Eugene Thacker, “Black Infinity.”

8 This is a recurring theme in Steven Shaviro, “The Universe of Things,” in The Universe of Things.

9 Eugene Thacker, “Black Infinity.”

10 Thacker describes this intellectual move as ‘immunological’ in reference to this boundary-policing impulse, whether it be between the human and the nonhuman, the living and the nonliving, etc. See Eugene Thacker, “Biophilosophy for the 21st Century.”

11 Eugene Thacker, After Life.

25 See Bogost, Alien Phenomenology.

These are just some sketchy thoughts I've been beaning around for the last few months.  It occurs to me that the most interesting aspect of Lovecraft's fiction, particularly his later fiction, is the deliberate nature of his reversal of the Aristotelian ontology of life and non-life which has generally been reinforced by Western thinking since the Enlightenment. This hierarchy is probably familiar: at the bottom is 'inert', 'passive' matter, next above matter is insensate but growing plant life, above plant life is sensate and animate animal life, and above that we find rational, creative, and communicative human life. One might include one more hierarchical tier within the realm of the human--namely the civilized, cultivated, and allegedly superior category of white, European humans who reside above the rest of humanity (in Western thinking). 

My contention is that HPL turns this hierarchy on its head with quite a bit of exactitude. For example, the alien races who displace notions of human superiority are often taxonomically identified with forms of life generally deemed to be simple, primitive, and less advanced than human beings: the Great Old Ones of At the Mountains of Madness are classified as plantlike, the Mi-Go of "The Whisperer in Darkness" are a combination of fungus and arthropod, the Deep Ones of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" are a combination of fish and amphibian, the Shoggoths of Mountains and "Shadow" are reminiscent of unicellular or amoebic protozoan life. Pushing farther out from the realm of the living into the realm of the Ancient Ones themselves, the alien god-entities of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos tend to exhibit anomalies of behavior and makeup which associate them with a weird, material quasi-life. Witness Cthulhu's plastic composition, the strange ultra-dimensionality of Yog-Sothoth, and the depiction of Azathoth as a nuclear chaos--associating this last most radically with a picture of matter itself as infernal, chaotic, capricious, potent, and terrifyingly willful yet mindless. 

There is one more component of Lovecraft's cosmology: the 'degraded' nonwhite cultists who often play a crucial role in this fictional world. Many simply write off Lovecraft's descriptions of these 'mongrel races' as symptomatic of his virulent racism, and while correct,  this yet ignores a deeper association at work: His positioning of nonwhites as associated with the nonhuman entities of his cosmology is intimately linked to his deliberate inversion of the Western cosmos. In fact, I think his work more clearly than much other speculative fiction, demonstrates how deeply implicated racist ideology is within the traditional structure of Enlightenment humanism. Consider that humanism, in its concentrated effort to define the human being, is structured by a necessarily exclusionary logic--in order to define what it is to be human, something must be considered not-human. Historically this meant many marginalized nonwhite groups were deemed not human, and even when finally included within an 'expanded' definition of the human race, are treated as less-than-human by the Western whites who historically controlled and disseminated such definitions. 

Lovecraft demonstrates, literally through his own racism, and in conjunction with his conceptual reversal of Aristotelian hierarchy, how closely tied together is the conception of the nonhuman as subordinate to the human and the conception of nonwhite humans as subordinate to white humans. This logic of subordination is not only mirrored between the two lines of thought, but the hierarchy is literally continuous from bottom to top. Put explicitly, Lovecraft's cosmology as a one-to-one reversal of Aristotle goes as follows: cultivated, white Westerner at the bottom, mixed-race nonwhite cultist above him, alien (but recognizably living) invertebrate-like creature above the cultist, and radically material god-entity residing at the top. 

A final word on the problematic logic of humanism: the problem with merely expanding the definition of the human to include more and more categories is that there's a limit to how much the category itself can contain. At the limit, it will either cease to have any definitional meaning (perhaps the best-case scenario), or a kind of conservative backlash will contract the definition and attempt to return the term to its 'pure', highly exclusionary original state (one could argue that this latter is a continuously present threat). In essence, what can be gained through humanism for human beings can be lost just as easily through the same humanist logic. It seems, therefore, the best we can do is attempt to disassemble the Western concept of the human. I think, interestingly, that Lovecraft's work points out the way, and that's where I take up his fiction in my own art. 

As a final note, I certainly hope this is not read as a defense of HPL's racism. There is far too much of that brand of apologetics rampant in fan circles, but there is also far too much in the way of simplistic analysis which dismisses as racist anyone who doesn't loudly condemn Lovecraft's work in total. While the former is indefensible and repugnant, the latter, to me, is crass and disingenuous.

To inaugurate my decision to post sketchy thoughts, here's a good example of something I just thought about today and wanted to get down in writing before I forget it. 

One of the criticisms often leveled at philosopher Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology is that his insistence that objects always 'withdraw' into their inner worlds, such that relation to other objects is always secondary, renders the ubiquity of entanglement between objects either unwieldy at best or somehow illusory at worst. 

The interesting thing for me is that I find the problem of access in Harman's work to be one of the features that's really interesting since it tends to blanket the universe of things in a tantalizing epistemic darkness. However, 'withdrawnness' doesn't seem to give the right picture as it tends to reduce the universe to a collection of static objects separated by unbridgeable gulfs of emptiness. His notion of 'subterranean' aspects to objects which can't be accessed by perception of their surface features offers a somewhat more evocative analogy for the relations between objects, but falls just short of its potential. I might replace 'withdrawal' with 'excess'; pointing to the sheer voluminousness of materiality that always exceeds our perceptual and conceptual grasp. 

To Harman's  'subterranean' aspects, I would also add 'extensive' aspects, such that the inner life of an object recedes both into itself but also extends away from the perceiving object. 

My thoughts here are really incomplete and I'm probably off the mark, but rendering this notion of 'extensive recession' in terms of entanglement between objects would seem to suggest the possibility for a kind of spatial limit to our ability to limn the contours our own entanglement. Meaning, we can apprehend the disparate objects that compose, adhere to, and contaminate us, and follow them to a point, but eventually we reach a limit, where the sheer excessiveness of matter results in a thing's nature extending away from us beyond our grasp. 

Here we are entangled, but there's a darkness at the horizon of our conceptual reach and a darkness within the tendrils of matter that enmesh and diffuse through our bodies. 

Thought I would dump a couple of announcements here. 2015 is going to be a very busy year for me! 

The project taking up most of my time right now is the book-format release of Der Trepanomikönen. I'm currently collating all the memoranda transmitted by the Trepidopterous...um...Disorgan(-ism?)(-ization?). Working as "their" pseudonym is a full-time task, I have to say. At any rate, independent publisher Are Not Books have picked me up and my collaboration with Matthew Smith, who runs the imprint, has been nothing short of excellent. The book should come out sometime this year, although it's difficult right now to pinpoint just when that will be, even down to the quarter.

I'll be contributing some images to a collaboration with Russian artist/writer Ilya Dolgov for his Forest Journal project. Expect more word on this collaboration and a number of others with my Russian friends soon!

I have a number of album cover commissions in the works as well, but for the time being I'll be keeping a lid on those. Announcements to come. Seems like the DeadSideOut sub-imprint is shaking the dust off yet again. 

I'm in talks with faculty at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, who are planning a panel on new materialism to take place later this Spring. I'll be sitting on the panel with two other artists, my University of Notre Dame MFA colleague Joseph G. Cruz, as well as Nate Morgan from the University of Michigan. So far, the thinking is that the panel will address the diverse philosophies that fall under the label 'new materialism' as well as discuss the different ways artists are mobilizing these ideas or manipulating them in their work. I feel I provide a unique perspective because the most straightforward way to deal with materialism in studio arts is through material manipulation, i.e. sculpture. Visual artists like myself have a different relationship to these ideas in terms of how we phrase our concerns and how we explore them. More details on that will be posted as they emerge. 

In other news, I recently purchased the domain name for this site, so navigation will no longer require the old .weebly.com address. It's just shoggothkinetics.com now. It wasn't really a cheap move, as it goes, but it felt like the right step. 

That said, a number of small changes will be happening, including a host of updates that I will slowly be getting around to. My artist statement on the homepage really needs re-vamping if not total re-writing. The project titled "Problematic Objects; Disappointing Aliens" has recently undergone a name-change and last semester saw a major conceptual shift in how I talk about this body of work. Once I solidify some of the explanatory writing and re-shoot some of the older pieces (the paintings now total 10 and one of the original paintings has been altered), I'll get that updated. 

I also think that producing fairly finished and fully-cited essays for this blog is too time-consuming if I want to post more regularly. It's just not possible to keep up a steady stream of content that meets such a high level of academic discourse--something that the sparse posting on this blog since the site's inception indicates. So, I'm probably going to shift to posting my thoughts-in-progress much more. I think the stakes are low enough with a blog that it won't make a difference to my readers (if I have many!) and this way I can post a lot more. I certainly write way more work than ever gets posted, mostly because up to this point I've been reluctant to post sketchy ideas and half-formed theses. 

So expect a change in the length of posts and the depth to which they've been thought through. All this work is intended to form the nuclei of later pieces of writing, particularly for my MFA thesis. So, the "Notes on Hyperhorror" series will undergo a bit of a shift with lots more short, sketchy posts and less of the lengthy, fully-researched and -cited essays. 

Sources:


Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. Duke University Press. 2010.

Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost (eds.). New Materialisms. Duke University Press. 2010.

Jabr, Ferris. “Why Life Does Not Really Exist.” Scientific American Blogs. 2012. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/2013/12/02/why-life-does-not-really-exist/

Mackay, Robin (ed.). Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development. Volume VI. Urbanomic. 2010.

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West. Vintage. 1992.

Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Bloomsbury Academic. 2010.

Negarestani, Reza. Cyclonopedia. Re:Press. 2008

Schneider, Eric D. and Dorion Sagan. Into the Cool: Thermodynamics, Energy Flow, and Life. University of Chicago Press. 2005.

Shaviro, Steven. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. University of Minnesota Press. 2014

Thacker, Eugene. After Life. University of Chicago Press. 2010.

Woodard, Ben. “A Nature to Pulp the Stoutest Philosopher: Towards a Lovecraftian Philosophy of Nature.” Real Horror. 2010. http://realhorror.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/ben-woodard-a-nature-to-pulp-the-stoutest-philosopher-towards-a-lovecraftian-philosophy-of-nature/#more-64

    I’m working on notes for a series of short essays and interviews examining the philosophical weirdness at the heart of many horror texts and how best to think about ‘weaponizing’ this weirdness. I’ve got some definite plans in the offing to interview at least two cool folks doing some cool things, an artist-illustrator and a fiction writer, respectively. I’m hoping to convince more people to submit to my interrogator’s chair, but we’ll see. I’m also going to do a number of case studies on texts which can serve as models for my ideas. I’m being really vague, I know, and that will be the big shortcoming of this first post, but hopefully things will get clearer later on. So here we go.

    The problem: much horror fiction (fantasy or sci-fi, literature, film, video games, art, etc) tends to depend on novel phenomena which are easily deconstructed to reveal human-centric socio-cultural anxieties. For example, a deconstruction of the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers easily reveals symbolized anxieties dealing both with the Cold War and with suburban American conformity. In this way, the speculative nature of the ‘horror’ effectively disappears. Many critics and writers will treat these interpretations of horror texts as totally exhaustive of the text itself, dismissing the weirdness that motivated the text in the first place (and which often remains in excess of the aforementioned interpretations). Banalized in this way, horror as a genre comes to serve a tepid role as ‘coping mechanism’ for ‘modern life's complexities.' In effect, the confrontation with the unknown, the potential philosophical raison d’etre of modern horror and science fiction, is occluded by more mundane surface reads.

    It’s my contention that horror as a textual device, whether in film, literature, art, or other media, can better serve its speculative core. Indeed, in a contemporary context, our confrontations with nonhumans, with other species, with ecological degradation and catastrophe, and with the wider universe and the limits of human knowledge requires a restating of this speculative core.

    The task is essentially simple: to construct the speculative aspect of fictive horror in such a way as to minimize the deconstruction of the ‘novel phenomenon’ into a metaphor or symbol for a historically specific sociocultural context. To be sure, it isn’t possible to completely eliminate these types of reads.. All writers and artists and thinkers exist in a historical context, and so will unconsciously absorb the social, political, and cultural anxieties of the time, as well as the central narratives which describe and reinforce those anxieties. Our work will always be susceptible to deconstruction to reveal these conditions and underlying preoccupations.

    But, increasingly, the speculative dimension of philosophy that horror addresses is actually bumping up against our everyday lives. It is mixing with the social, with the political, and with the cultural. It is becoming increasingly relevant, even if most people are generally unaware. To take advantage of this, horror texts can be written in such a way that the confrontation with the unknown, the approach to the unhuman, the revealing of the outlines of a subterranean, planetary, nuomenal darkness are able to function as the central thematic struts. These things, if structured in the right way, can become what the story is really about, rather than thin veils for the sublimation of other anxieties. I would call this deliberate attempt “hyperhorror.”

    From the outset I want to acknowledge that what I’m talking about is not new. I’m not laboring under the idea that I’m inventing a new genre of horror fiction or anything like that. What I’m arguing for is a certain resumption of the underlying project of horror as a cultural textual device. I’m not speaking of horror as a literary genre. I’m not talking about signs on bookstore shelves, or categories on web retail sites. I am careful not to limit the concept of horror to literature. It is an expansive textual device which can involve art, the internet, and video game craft, among other platforms. And at its foundation there is a feedback loop between literature, criticism, science, and philosophy which, in their reciprocal discourse, provides the meat and gristle for this enterprize as well as the tools to analyze and critique it.

    Before ending this first short note I want to quickly define horror in its affective sense. And before I do even this, I do want to acknowledge that the vernacular definition for horror has shifted somewhat in the last 100 years or so. I’m not really a scholar in the field, but my impression is that the popular genre use of the word ‘horror’ now unofficially connotes the sensation more accurately described as ‘terror’. I won’t get into the problem (in our current sociopolitical context) of trying to reinstitute ‘terror’ as the proper genre title for this enterprise (try to imagine the public reception of something called ‘hyperterror’). So we’ll stick with horror, and simply point out that we don’t mean bodily disgust and fear of injury or death when we use the word.

    For my purposes, the affective sense of horror in the context of hyperhorror is a general but acute feeling of fear or dread of a novel phenomenon (or phenomena) mixed with an awe of the scale, unfathomability, or utter alienness of the forces engendering the phenomena. At its best, a concept of hyperhorror should minimize moralizing the horror response: it should focus on the horror itself as neutral, resulting in a paralyzing hesitation, a simultaneous push and pull between profound realization and total incomprehension. Hyperhorror eliminates crude human actionables from the menu of human responses. All that we can do is watch and wait. It pushes the horror to a fever pitch while simultaneously demanding that its audience not reduce horror to ‘a bad thing that we can and should fight against.’

    In the next short note, I want to briefly examine my own specific interests in hyperhorror as an artist, which are currently threefold: the creature, the ontology of life, and the recalcitrance of matter. Later on, we’ll look at some ‘model texts’ for my ideas -- works that can serve as jumping off points for pushing these ideas further.

I've submitted a proposal for the upcoming AAF conference taking place in Sydney, Australia early next year at the National Institute for Experimental Arts. Fingers crossed. The text of my proposal is below.


Project title: Econgeal


What does ecological knowledge “look like?” Based on background learning in biological science and validated and extended by the work of Timothy Morton, Eugene Thacker and others, the project I’d like to propose seeks to give visual form to the spatio-temporal collapse of the biosphere that results from contemplating current ecological thinking. The term "econgeal" implies a thickening or running together of ecology, a collapse in which every articulation of the living with itself is redrawn as continuous. Thus, all scales are flattened and their omnivalent/ambivalent complicity is revealed: pest, predator, disease, invader, saprophyte, opportunist, extremophile, colonizer, parasite, hive, all are maintained in an undifferentiated state. Simultaneously, bodies, cells, organs, meat, gristle, tissue, sensory apparatus, and empty space are elucidated in detail.


I see this work as functioning like a map, but one in which the overwhelming profusion of details and linkages engenders confusion, undermining itself as a useful model. In my attempt to create a ‘map of the world as big as the world’, I hope to posit something of a re-seeing of "the living" in a pre-classificatory sense in which nothing is particularly distinguishable and causal chains are linked in complex, intimate "meshes". One question that might emerge: are we looking at knowledge or its absence? Is there potential for a questioning of traditional aesthetic modes of seeing the world through simplified tropes (simply by proliferating them to an excessive degree)?  Trying to see complexity, trying to encompass the whole world within the visual as it is privileged by human beings, may be shot through with contradictions and paradoxes; it may be beyond our perceptual abilities.


This proposal is for a large-scale drawing, approximately 9’ h x 3’ w, ink on paper. Installation to be achieved with neodymium magnets and metal, flat-headed push pins. Work on the image is currently underway. Progress shots are enclosed with the proposal.


Short artist bio:

Lucas Korte is a 2nd year MFA student in painting and drawing at the University of Notre Dame (USA). He holds a Bachelors degree in biology from Wayne State University (USA). His work is concerned with the unhuman, particularly through the lens of invertebrate animals. More work and writing can be found at shoggothkinetics.weebly.com. email lkorte@nd.edu

One way to think about popular culture's formulation of the extraterrestrial is by separating it into two categories: Trevor Paglen writes of the stranger-alien which exhibits anthropomorphic intelligence and culture, or at the very least can interact with human beings. This is generally the alien creature found in Hollywood movies and in video games--an alien which could be said to act as a prop for turning the camera back on the human protagonists, always the central concern of humanistic narrative. The second category which Paglen delineates is the alien-alien, which I call the ‘disappointing alien’ - this creature exhibits a biology which prohibits any meaningful interaction with humans - either they simply cannot or do not acknowledge us, or they are so other as to be difficult to recognize as a form of life.

In his 1989 essay “the Paradox of the Phasmid”, philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman makes a statement about the eponymous insect that encapsulates some of the thinking behind my disappointing aliens: “It is an animal without head or tail, a dissimilar animal which, strictly speaking, we could never envision head-on like a living thing whose motions I can predict or, simply, whose mouth I can locate and thereby locate myself in front of it.” The ability or inability to locate oneself as a human being in relation to these ‘things’ is just one question that concerns me. 

From that jumping-off point I’m positioning this series of paintings as an attempt to imagine or ‘think’ that other form of life. Several issues are raised: any attempt to imagine the alien “out there” is culturally-grounded--the very act of imagining is constrained by the content of one’s own cultural experience. What starts as an attempt to focus on, and essentially value, the alien-in-itself becomes an ontological exercise in thinking life-in-itself or the world-without-us (or the universe-without-us). These paintings now have to deal with the limit of imagination, indeed, with the limit of the thought of life itself. This plays into my formal decisions, namely the use of darkness and very localized light. In our attempts to interrogate the universe, we’re confronted with the little bits that are comprehensible to us out of the surrounding, pressing morass of darkness and unthinkability. 

Media theorist Eugene Thacker in his discussion of William Hope Hodgson’s 1912 novel The Night Land describes the plight of the human characters thusly: “[They]...are like naturalists visiting a strange land, having brought the wrong bestiary with them.” “[The] life-forms [they confront] are not named, only described--that is their incomprehensibility results in the substitution of description for (taxonomic) naming.” 

"Not only are they unable to analyze and classify the life of the Night Land, they are unable to distinguish the living from the nonliving. In the Night Land, everything appears to be alive, but none of it is living in any naturalistic, let alone humanistic, sense of the term. They are effectively in Kant's position vis-a-vis the question of purposiveness and order of life--able to comprehend that there is something "out there", but unable to think that something in itself."

This problem of the liminal or spectral nature of the living-nonliving distinction has led me to posit different sorts of ‘network organisms’ in the paintings. For these things, whatever they are, there appears to be little distinction between environment and creature, calling into question whether it even makes sense to make such distinctions (recalling to mind Didi-Huberman’s statement about the phasmid, that, quite literally the creature is “that which it eats and that in which it lives").

I'm coming more and more to posit this project as sort of 'doing philosophy in paint'. Having to sit with these ideas and work them out visually is a way to clarify and advance my thinking. And as the concepts or vague ideas for the next set of paintings begin to coalesce, I feel like I'm getting farther with those ideas--with actually trying to think them. This is not to say I'm solving the Kantian problem. Merely that I'm throwing a lot of conceptual elaboration at these questions. I don't think I can quite stress enough how central that's coming to be for how I do this.

So, it's acutely embarrassing at this point that I only have three paintings! Considering the amount of time I've spent writing and thinking there should be more work to show for it, but I will say the delay in getting more paint on surfaces has been logistical (money, of course). There are a growing number of sketches for future paintings piling up and I'm anxious to get started with the next batch (not to mention get better documentation of the finished ones). 

A couple of other questions this work raises for me:

It's impossible, because of the culturally grounded nature of the act of imagining, for these to be totally alien. We simply can't truly think the thought of that other life. So, one side effect of doing this project is what I call the mirror-effect: both because and in spite of their very alienness or non-terrestriality, the concepts underlying these creatures can draw parallels with our own local situation: our own boundary-less-ness, our entanglement with the environment, the sort of dark-life problem at the heart of our biologistic understanding of the world (i.e. that at the limit, life can't really be distinguished from non-life). In fact, the notion of looking particularly at the paradoxes and problems of life and its ontology and then speculating about extraterrestrials based on those is part of a larger argument about the role of a 'speculative biology' that I'm currently pulling together.

This of course becomes of moment in the ecological and geological epoch we find ourselves in. The work then can function as a bit of an ecological call. We are, in a way, not really different from the weird aliens in the paintings--we are just one weird entangled state among countless other entangled states, one planet among countless planets or planes of weird, entangled spectrality--just one oddity in a vast abyss of oddities--all aliens in the abverse. 

A final question is about the concept of valuing this alienness, and positioning ourselves to value the alien-thing-for-itself, or the world-for-itself. At this point Paglen's discussion of the cultural choice to relate to the alien-alien being a reflection of an ethical commitment to the world becomes important. For me, the horror of the unhuman world, the unhuman planet in Thacker's terminology, is not a horror that closes off discourse. It is not a moralizing horror. It does not posit that "the unhuman is bad and the human is good, therefore..." Instead, that horror is a concomitant of the awe and respect of the universe, both local and non-local, that comes with recognizing that the world is not for us. This is vastly different from one accusation leveled at speculative realism: that it guarantees a dismissive misanthropy.

I personally find the aforementioned horror to be a kind of 'delicious' horror - a luxurious horror. Existential dread, to me, is potentially conceivable as a luxury. And it is not an idle one--it does not have to be nihilistic in the naive sense. It can, in fact, lead to a more realistic coping with the complexities of the unthinkable ecological system that we find ourselves embedded in.

References:

Didi-Huberman, Georges. "The Paradox of the Phasmid." USC.edu. 1989. http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/3/phasmid.html

Harman, Graham. "Steve Fuller Vs. Administrators." Object Oriented Philosophy. May, 2014.
http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2014/05/27/steve-fuller-vs-administrators/

Paglen, Trevor. "Friends of Space, How are You All, Have You Eaten Yet, or Why Talk to Aliens Even if We Can't." Afterall. Issue 32. 2013.
http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.32/friends-of-space-how-are-you-all-have-you-eaten-yet-or-why-talk-to-aliens-even-if-we-can-t

Thacker, Eugene. After Life. University of Chicago Press. 2010.

Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of This Planet. Zero Books. 2011.